Multi-taskers R US

The other day I was working on a project for work and also chatting via IM with a coworker in France. She worried that she was keeping me form my work, but I reassured her that I was very steadily working through my tasks while working. Instead of the chat being a distraction, the chat helped to keep me focused on my work. If I wasn’t chatting with her, my brain would have been flitting around, and I would have lost focus on the tasks in front of me. At some point a while back, I’m sure I read an article discussing this multi-tasking phenomenon. I’ve managed to train my brain to not be able to focus unless I am doing a number of things at once.

I cherish the online chats I have with my co-workers. Working from home, separated by an ocean from most of my team, it is non-trivial to stay connected and maintain good working relationships. Isn’t that bizarre? I don’t mind chat, despite despising the intrusion of phone calls. I wonder if the chat is asynchronous enough that if I lose focus on the chat for a moment, it doesn’t appear quite as rude as when I “zone out” while on the phone?

Later in the day, I tried to count the number of things I was doing at once. I think I counted more than five. I was walking on the treadmill, working (don’t worry, it was a task that was well-suited to being done while I walked), updating the OS on my personal machine, homeschooling the girls, doing laundry, checking personal mail (via my phone while waiting for files to open on the work machine)…

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. But I don’t wonder if the ill-effects of this multi-tasking are worth the benefits — which, at the very least, include managing to get everything done in a day!